The moment has almost come for Sony to supercede its poster child, the PlayStation 3, with the company lifting the curtain and unveiling details of the forthcoming PlayStation 4 to the sound of gasps from gamers all over the world.

The general consensus seems to be that the PS4 has ridden itself of most of the problems that plagued its older brother. According to 405, the first step towards this was designing the console with game developers in mind, ensuring that players on both sides know what going down. There was a disconnect with the PS3 in this area, resulting in plenty of disgruntled developers loaded with extra work.

At first, leaked images of designs for the new DualShock 4 controller looked almost too futuristic, but the rumours proved true. The new controller (pictured below) is starting to resemble that of the Xbox e.g. it now has the whole trigger thing going for it, but it also a LCD touchscreen in the centre.

On top of this, the console will boast an impressive 8-core processor with 8GB of memory and while they are yet to detail specifics on the topic of how they will utilise the HDD, it’s believed they will incorporate a mix of both solid storage and cloud storage.

Gameplay will also be enhanced by the “suspend and resume” function, making redoing a level just to get to the checkpoint so you can save a thing of the past. Thank god.

Now, the online area is where shit gets real. You will be able to actually play the games while they download onto the console and that means no more waiting. “Our long-term vision is to reduce download times of digital titles to zero,” said Mark Cerny, lead system architect, which is worth of applause in and of itself. PlayStation will also keep track of which games you play and buy and will work towards selecting games you want before you even know you want them. Once there, the console will download the game for you so it’s sitting there waiting for you to simply click ‘buy.’

Sony have also taken a page from bitter rivals Nintendo‘s book and will be closely tying the portable Vita device with the new console, giving gamers the option of switching from the big screen to a small, handheld screen. This will come in handy should you need to get out of the house, but don’t want to stop playing.

It’s hard to not drool a little reading all this. I know it makes the head spin. But here in lies the rub – they haven’t announced a release date other than “Holiday 2013”, whatever that means, nor have they given any indication what the console will look like, and we STILL don’t know how much this warlock of a invention will cost.

Surely, with E3 kicking off in June, all will be revealed, with Microsoft also expected to be unveiling the brand-new Xbox ‘720’.